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Looking back is sometimes easier than looking forward. Scrolling through my reviews for 2018 brought back connections I made through books, and, as I tried to identify one book from each month, I remembered the year. I found a book for each month except June, and the one posting for that month titled A Prescription for Comfort Books was a reminder of my fall.

Here are my favorites for 2018 – have you read any?

January, 2018 – I started the year with Roz Chast’s Going Into Town, my favorite book of the year.

February, 2018 – a complicated puzzle of lives and loves – The Maze at Windermere by Gregory Blake

The election results tonight is a nail-biter, and I have been trying to distract myself by looking for book lists. A list of favorite books by a favorite author – Ann Patchett – caught my eye. Patchett, author of Commonwealth, also owns an independent bookstore in Tennessee – Parnassus Books. Parade magazine asked her to pick seventy-five of her favorite books from each decade for the past seventy-five years. You can see the complete list at Ann Patchett’s Seventy Five Books.

I picked one book from each decade from her list:

1940’s – A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

1950’s – Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White

1960’s – Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child

1970’s – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

1990’s – The Secret History by Donna Tartt

2000’s – Old Filth by Jane Gardam

2010s – The Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St. Aubyn

I did not forget the 1980’s; none of the books listed were among my favorites. I would have picked Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively.

If you want to understand who a person is, look at their book shelves. It was no surprise when I recently found rows of mystery paperbacks on a friend’s shelves as I helped clear out her stash, but it was a surprise to find the complete set of Elena Ferrante from My Brilliant Friend to The Story of the Lost Child. It was no surprise to find Vogue fashion but the complete set of Playbills took me back. Not so much what we read, but what we save after we read often tell stories about what we value and perhaps what we dream about.

Realizing this, I wondered if I should reconfigure my own shelves. I wouldn’t want to be misunderstood by the books I left behind. Maybe it was time to ditch Margaret Dods’ The Housewife’s Manual or my mother’s 1933 copy of The Modern Handbook for Girls. Harris’ Twenty Minute Retreats could stay as well as The Thurber Carnival. But maybe the complete set of Harry Potter could make room for other books. The Shaker Handbook, a gift to thank me for making a speech years ago and the Annapolitan Quality of Life, with an article on my younger days, remind me of when I was more productive, so they will stay – along with all the cookbooks and treasured children’s books. I still smile when I look at the cover of the old Free To Be You And Me; it seems more anachronistic in its advice than The Modern Handbook for Girls.

Once upon a time I had a wall of books, dating from childhood, through college and graduate school, with whispers of career days, and on to the luxury of reading whatever I wanted to read. Sadly, the wall is gone, replaced by only a few shelves. One shelf has the current reads, rotating with library books and those books I could not get out of a bookstore without buying – all regularly replaced. But the other shelves have those old friends I cannot part with – telling the story of who I am.

But not everyone will understand. Someday, someone will clean out my shelves and wonder why I saved W.B. Yeats: Romantic Visionary. They will think I loved the poetry, but, alas, the book was only a reminder of a Dublin adventure.

As I continue my search for a good book “to lose myself in,” an article from Real Simple magazine found me, with a list of books recommended by authors – 31 Noted Authors Share Their Favorite Books. Many were classics (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, The Maltese Falcon, Giant); others recently popular (Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Gilead, Beautiful Ruins); some I’ve read: